Blogged

August 20, 2007

Domestic Spying: Stretching Inches into Miles

Posted by The Crux |
Not content with the ability to secretly tap into Americans' emails and phone calls, the Bush Administration seeks to expand its domestic-spying powers:

"A program approved by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security
will allow broader domestic use of secret overhead imagery beginning as
early as this fall, with the expectation that state and local law
enforcement officials will eventually be able to tap into technology
once largely restricted to foreign surveillance....

"The program, described yesterday by the Wall Street Journal,
quickly provoked opposition from civil liberties advocates, who said
the government is crossing a well-established line against the use of
military assets in domestic law enforcement" (Washington Post)....

"Privacy is being eroded to fight
symptoms of larger problems (badly waged war on drugs, crappy middle eastern
policies, poverty etc etc). How much privacy are we going to allow to slip away
before we start fighting the fire rather than the smoke? And then there's corporate data mining...."

This Administration has already shown a penchant for using taxpayer resources for political gain. Might some over-zealous operative use the "secret overhead imagery" equipment to spy on political "enemies"? For those who think it's beyond possibility's realm, I have one word: Watergate.

"While some conservatives undoubtedly would argue that they see nothing
wrong with giving law-enforcement agencies access to existing
technology, others will rightly object on two grounds. First, the
obvious application for the sneak-peek technology would be to avoid
search warrants. If probable cause existed for a warrant, law
enforcement wouldn't need the satellite technology; they'd simply
enter. That's the way it's supposed to work, and has worked well for
over 200 years. Civil liberty is based in part on judicial oversight of
law enforcement encroachment on private property, which the sneak-peek
technology would obliterate.

"Second and perhaps more importantly, American legal tradition has
separated military and foreign-intel collection from domestic law
enforcement, and for good reasons. The Posse Comitatus Act
forbids the military (except the Coast Guard, for certain purposes)
from acting in a law-enforcement role, except under emergencies
specifically requiring martial law."

"Given the seeming public acceptance of surveillance cameras in public areas, I imagine that many people won’t have a problem with this. The
problem, though, is that there is yet another erosion of the line
between domestic law enforcement and the military, first established in
the Posse Comitatus Act....

"Turning the very hardware of the military and intelligence communities
over to domestic law enforcement and, in effect, spying on the American
public goes a step too far, and takes us further down the road that
the Posse Comitatus Act was intended to divert us from."

"The only thing certain is these military satellites are extraordinarily
powerful, literally able to see through walls and their full
capabilities are, (here's the big surprise), completely secret from
everyone but a handful of intelligence agents. As for oversight of
possible abuse of the system -- surely you jest.